Closing the Customer Loop

Zendesk is a Danish creator of a cool little help desk tool. I initially covered their offering on my own blog when I thought that Zendesk was a nice little standalone solution, that would provide some real utility for businesses with a support requirement.

Of course I'm a firm believer in the value of aggregation – I know just how busy young businesses can be and always like to hear about offerings that help this busy-ness by aggregating a few different functions within one.

That's why I was stoked when Zendesk told me of their recent release of full integration with Salesforce.com. It's a lovely little combination of a customer facing tool (help desk) with an internal facing tool (CRM). Considering that the customers in question are the same no matter the perspective, and the issues raised within a help desk setting are eminently of note for a sales team, this is a logical step.

CEO of Zendesk, Mikkel Svane says that;

Ironically, most SaaS CRM and helpdesk solutions focus exclusively on internal processes and are quite difficult to integrate to a company’s website. By combining Salesforce and Zendesk you simultaneously achieve closed- loop communication with your customers from your website to your help desk and from sales to support

The Salesforce – Zendesk integration allows customers to submit support requests through email, web forms, forums and widgets. Requests are immediately captured and accessible by sales staff using Salesforce.com and support staff using Zendesk. Internal employees can look up support tickets using Salesforce.com contacts and accounts, while external customers get automated updates from Zendesk by email, forums, widgets and RSS – all in all a logical integration use case.

A quote from a Zendesk customer is pretty telling;

When we adopted Salesforce, we were in need of not only a lead management system, but one that could create price quotes / orders, and be integrated (rudimentally) into our accounting system. We moved to Salesforce from an installed, custom developed application. At the time, we were paying about $5,000 per year for Salesforce. We now pay close to $40,000 per year and are continually running out of storage space. It's so ridiculous that we are investigating an Apex app that stores all attachments outside of Salesforce, like Amazon/s3 or our FTP server… *just to save money*! It's complexity has grown into a barrier for on-boarding new employees for us. We are missing that old custom, installed app right now

It seems that Salesforce is doing good things in it's specific product line – but for specialist options customers are preferring the smaller, more nimble (read cheaper) providers.

Zendesk are getting some good exposure and also broadening their customer base – they're a start-up with an offbeat and fun attitude and are one to watch.